Martha Jungwirth’s exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac Seoul, Looking the Goat in the Eye, marks the Austrian painter’s first solo presentation in South Korea. Recent works in oil paint and watercolour will be on view, showcasing the breadth of the artist’s sources of inspiration, as well as her idiosyncratic painting process, which she describes as a ‘dynamic space’ of ‘action and passion’.

Martha Jungwirth has been a central figure in the Austrian art scene for over six decades, but it is within the past 15 years that her vivid and expressive paintings have garnered universal acclaim and international attention. Neither figurative nor resolutely abstract, her works are firmly anchored in the world around her and draw on a variety of sources, from the artist’s travels to the media, as well as mythology and the history of art. All of these are described as ‘impulses’ by Jungwirth, which she channels onto the paper in ‘a flow undisturbed by reflection’. This embodied, visceral approach to painting is echoed in the palette of her works, which often feature bright shades of red, pink flesh tones and bruised magentas.

The late 18th- and early 19th-century Spanish painter Francisco de Goya has been of particular interest to Jungwirth in recent years. A number of her works draw on etchings and paintings by the artist, who has been described as both the last of the Old Masters and the forefather of European modern art. As their titles indicate, three of the large paintings on view in the exhibition are based on the early 19th-century work by Goya: The Burial of the Sardine (Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid, Spain). Dancing revellers in white dresses can be discerned in Jungwirth’s paintings, echoing the central figures in Goya’s carnival scene. But Jungwirth’s subjects always remain beyond the easily identifiable, capturing instead the energy of the source image as channelled through the artist herself, her body and movements.